Many users at the mobile prepaid market extremity use prepaid as a “pretext to calling”, ringing and hanging up before the called party answers in order to deposit a “missed call” and thereby freely signaling the other party to call back. In a calling party pays world, “miss calling” in the manner and the resultant return, effectively reverses the connection and the billing between the caller (A) and the called party (B) as incoming calls are connected without cost to the recipient.
When a prepaid subscriber requests a call, the servicing operator billing system verifies that the caller has sufficient credit to complete the call before permitting the call to continue and progress beyond setup to the terminating phase (ringing and answering).
This early, originating, call setup stage billing verification ensures that the caller at minimum has sufficient credit to cover the first billing increment if the call is permitted to progress to the dialed destination and the call is answered. It is a revenue assurance policy that only permits calls go to completion if the user has the necessary funds in order to pay for the resultant voice communication.
The quantum of prepaid credit required to progress the call to a terminating phase may be dependent on whether the caller is on a per second or per minute billing protocol. However the credit required typically covers the first minute of use since the terminating carrier often bills the originating carrier on a per minute basis to terminate traffic on its network.
Prepaid telephony is premised on cyclical top up, and the need for airtime replenishment is well known in the art, since a prepaid balance depletes with use over time. Many users however regularly find themselves without sufficient prepaid credit remaining in their account to raise a call. These users become dormant as they can no longer access the network and engage the ring to drive their own inbound connections using the “miss calling protocol”.
There is thus a need to continue servicing these users without credit, along the established call path, in a signaling context, permitting them to continue “miss calling”, without disrupting the core prepaid premise governing telephony, which is “users are required to have sufficient prepaid credit (airtime) in order to engage in a voice conversation”.